Contest: Win a copy of Craig Boyko’s short story collection, Blackouts, courtesy of McClelland & Stewart. Coming Soon. Pullman awoke in the middle of the night, listening. He did not have to turn over to know that his wife was in bed beside him. He could feel the displacement in the mattress, could feel in the air the contribution of a second set of warm lungs. He held his own breath and listened — turning his attention inside out, letting it seep out of his head and into the distant corners of the house. He could see, but no longer hear, the thumping of his heart, which caused his vision to shudder and buckle every half-second. He closed his eyes, waiting, listening.

When the sound came again, it was faint but unmistakable, like a fingerprint on the air. Downstairs, the loose floorboard had creaked.

Claire lay beside him, and neither of the girls was heavy enough to make the floorboard creak. He opened his eyes. The sound of his beating heart returned in a deafening flood.

There was someone in the house.

His mind, that resourceful optimist, flashed through a series of harmless images: It was John Wiesel, their nosy next-door neighbour, looking for candles or batteries (but the power was not out). It was his mother-in-law, in distress (but she didn’t have a car, and wouldn’t she have rung the doorbell?). It was only his brother (but his brother was in Yellowknife). It was an animal of some sort, come in through the doggy door (but he had fastened it shut three years ago, after the dog died). It was nothing at all, it was no one, it was just the sound of the house settling in the middle of the night.

Or it was an intruder.

What should he do? Go down there and confront them? What if they had a knife or a gun? What if there was more than one of them? Even if there was only one, Pullman knew that he wasn’t exactly an imposing figure, he had no self-defence training, he had no weapon. He wished for a moment that he owned a gun. Then, reflexively, he went over the litany of reasons why he did not: a gun was more likely to kill one of your own family members than an intruder; the girls might discover it one day while searching for birthday presents; it might go off in your hands while you were cleaning it; you might (theoretically) get drunk and start waving it at your spouse to punctuate an argument; you might wake in the middle of the night, thinking you’d heard someone inside your house, and carry it downstairs with you for protection and peace of mind, only to end up shooting the neighbour’s cat when it came bounding out of the kitchen, or yourself in the foot when the furnace started up.

And even those times, like now, when there was undoubtedly someone in your house, a gun was likely to do you more harm than good. The intruder wouldn’t hesitate to fire his own gun when he saw yours, and if he had no gun there was always a chance that he’d wrest yours away from you, or that you’d shoot yourself in the scuffle. In any imaginable scenario, it was better to be unarmed. The intruder would be less willing to hurt you or your family if you were unable to hurt him. Defencelessness was a powerful defence.

He wished he had a gun. He did not want to go downstairs without a weapon, some weapon. He did not want to go downstairs at all. He did not even want to get out of bed. He was comfortable. The floor would be cold.

He was being foolish. But was it any less foolish to get out of bed and confront who-knew-what downstairs? If his intention was to scare the burglar away (and surely he could have no other intention), he could do that just as well from up here, by shouting down the stairs that he was calling the police. Such an action would not impress Claire, perhaps. But then Claire was hardly susceptible to being impressed by brazen or brainless displays of machismo either. If she were awake now (he wished she were awake; he wished she had been the one to hear the floorboard creak, not him), he knew that she would not be goading him on. On the contrary, she would insist that he quietly call the police while she quietly collected the children. Perhaps he should wake her now and suggest this plan himself?